Cost of Europe’s 20-year copyright extension? €1 billion

Intellectual property academics claim that 20 more years of protection for …

Martin Kretschmer, Director of the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management at Bournemouth University, is not a happy man. After the Council of the European Union this week passed a 20-year extension on musical copyrights, Kretschmer denounced the move as a billion-euro boondoggle—almost all of which will go to the record labels rather than the "poor session musicians" the proposal claimed to serve.

Kretschmer has studied the issue professionally for years, writing on this specific proposal since 2009 and on general IP issues for much longer. After the vote was cast, he took to Bournemouth's website to explain how "72 percent of the financial benefits from term extension will accrue to record labels. Of the 28 percent that will go to artists, most of the money will go to superstar acts, with only 4 percent benefiting those musicians mentioned in the European Council press release as facing an 'income gap at the end of their life times.' Many performers also do not appear to understand that the proposal would lead to a redistribution of income from living to dead artists."

It's no little bit of cash we're talking about here, either. Kretschmer and colleagues in Amsterdam, Cambridge, and Munich have all concluded that the cost of the extension will be a whopping one billion euros, transferred from the public to the music labels. In the long-term, huge numbers of artists will be affected, but in the short term, it's all about still-lucrative hits from the 1960s.

"Labels do not want to lose the revenues of the classic recordings of the 1960s which are reaching the end of their current 50 year term," wrote Kretschmer. "Rather than innovating, right holders find it much easier to exclude competition. Europe is in danger of locking away her music heritage just as digital technology is enabling the opening of the archives."